Lensyl Urbano – Page 194 – Montessori Muddle

Choose your own adventure on a Wiki

I was listening to an On The Media interview of Bob Stein on the future of books and started to think about how to use collaborative writing in my class. Since we use our wiki allot (for practically everything), it occurred to me that the wiki is the ideal platform for students to write a choose-your-own-adventure type story. A quick web search there is already a choose your own adventure website/wiki that is set up just for this.

The way I envision it working in my class is that each student would write a section/chapter and end with a set of choices which would be links to new chapters. To make it interesting and more collaborative, very time students had to add to the story they would have to start from another student’s decision.

I really can’t wait to try this. I think I’ll make a new section of the story a weekly writing assignment.

Asynchronous lessons

Halite — 3D model of halite unit cell from GeoMod

An interesting thing happened last week that I perhaps should have anticipated. Because we had a little extra time during Thanksgiving week I offered to do a technology lesson on 3d programming if anyone was interested. One student was very interested and a couple others wanted to do it later. I usually try to do basic lessons for everyone at the same time in order to save time, but because the one students was very excited about the lesson I just gave it to them.

Over the next two days, the first student had given the lesson to another who’d planned to wait until later, and I was having requests from other students who had not been interested in programming at all to be able to do the subject.

I guess I learned a couple things from this. First, that asynchronous lessons might be something I should do more often. If certain students are more interested in the subject then the lesson is more effective given to them. Second, that student interest in infectious. If they are excited about a subject they tend to want to share with others, and that seems like a very effective way of propagating information; each student only gets the info when their interest has been sparked. Furthermore, since different students are more interested in different subjects they, theoretically, all have the opportunity to be the expert, if they’re interested in that type of recognition. The trick, I guess, is making sure that everyone gets the lesson and information at some point before they loose interest.

Apprentice sentences: Sarah Palin?

Slate has a great apprentice sentence contest called can you write like Sarah Palin. The Slate post dissects Palin’s sentences beautifully as having: “multiple references to local flora and fauna, heavy use of PSAT vocabulary, slightly defensive tone, difficult-to-parse meaning”. One example sentence, “As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on.”

Cat traps

One interesting metaphor for teacher-student interactions is that of cats and dogs. Cats tend to want things like acknowledgment and praise on their own terms. They can be quite the challenge to interact with and it is often difficult to get them to show interest in anything. One thing that’s worked for me is to leave “cat traps” around the classroom. The box of pulleys, or a couple boxes with batteries, wires and motors. The “traps” are usually related to something we’ll be covering later in the year, but they are left out with no explanation or instructions for purely exploratory experimentation. I might, if they seem interested, show them something cool that can be done with the gear once I see them start playing with them on their own.

By the time the subject comes around in the curriculum the cats have usually developed a pretty good basic idea of the gear and have often shared this with others. I think it is a great way of driving learning through intrinsic student interests and peer-teaching. The only problem, is sometimes the students will gravitate toward the traps more than toward what they’re supposed to be doing.

Hello world!

Because I can never remember even half of the great stuff I would like to use in my Montessori Middle School Class, I’ve created this little, external, supplement so I don’t have to.

The theme of this blog is spotlighting the beautiful, odd, perplexing things that might attract the curiosity of the early adolescent.

Please help yourself, and I’d love to have your comments if you use something and it worked (or especially if it did not).